1) Colchester United

Colchester United’s dinky Weston Homes Community stadium, opened in 2008 to replace the decrepit Layer Road, has developed a handy sideline in musical tribute acts. Impersonators of Dolly Parton, Wham! and Take That are all coming to town soon – book now to avoid disappointment – and you might say that the football usually on offer at the ground is also an imitation of the stuff played by actual stars. Aye, in the days of Premier League razzamatazz and omni-drama, it can be a hard sell trying to generate interest in a club that has spent 60 of the last 64 years in the third or fourth tiers. Even the club’s League One record so far this season – won five, drawn five, lost five – makes them sound boring, their existence of no interest to anyone beyond local die-hards. But come on now, let’s try harder than that.

Anything more than a glance at Colchester reveals that this is a club for which you could develop an affection. Or a healthy loathing, whichever feels right. Even before they were elected to the Football League in 1950, they’ve been thrilling and upsetting people, producing one of the great FA Cup runs when they knocked out three league opponents on their way to the fifth round in 1947-48. Then, of course, there was the famous giant-killing of Don Revie’s Leeds United in 1971, when the former Ipswich Town striker Ray Crawford scored twice in a 3-2 win for the then-Fourth Division club. There has been lots more captivating intrigue, tension and excitement during six decades that have featured seven promotions, eight relegations, flashes of optimism, pangs of betrayal, brushes with oblivion and rivalries that make a little sense and a lot of memories.

There was Phil Parkinson guiding them to the second tier for the first time in their history in 2006, then defecting to Hull City the following season and getting tonked 5-1 on his return to Layer Road, with Chris Iwelumo scoring four times. Then, after their relegation back to the third tier, there was Paul Lambert leading them to an impossible 7-1 victory over their East Anglian neighbours Norwich City before defecting to Norwich and leading the Canaries to promotion instead. And this season, despite an uninspiring pattern of results, Tony Humes’ team are playing a vibrant style of offensive football and providing goals, joy and hope, which is why home attendances are creeping back up towards the 5,000 mark. The current side will have to go some, mind you, to provide more entertainment than the 1991-92 team. Now there was a fine time to be a Colchester United fan.

The Weston Homes Community Stadium under lights in 2014. Photograph: Jamie McDonald/Getty Images

That was the year of one of the greatest title campaigns in any division. Colchester went head-to-head with Martin O’Neill’s Wycombe Wanderers for the entire season as both teams opened up a huge gap over the rest of the Conference as they sought to regain league status. And Colchester’s player-manager, Roy McDonough, who holds the record for the most red cards in English football, made it all the more engrossing by personalising the title race in a way that might have made even José Mourinho wince.

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Here’s McDonough recalling his approach in a 2003 interview with The Scotsman: “The rivalry between us was strong. I made a couple of remarks in a local paper saying that they would bottle it and it got back to Martin. Martin called me and wanted to know why I was winding people up. In December we beat them 3-0 at home and when we were three up with 20 minutes to go, the ball went out and the ball boy threw it back to me. I looked at Martin on the bench and shouted to my players ‘no more goals, let’s play keep ball.’ We must have strung together 27, 28, 29 passes and Martin knew then that we were taking the piss.”

The teams met again the following week in the Bob Lord trophy, with Wycombe winning 6-2 but McDonough claiming, with dubious merit, that he had won a psychological victory because he had played all of his players out of position just to show O’Neill that he was still taking the piss. In the other league clash between the sides that season, Colchester won 2-1 thanks to a 90-yard goal by their keeper, Scott Barratt. Colchester and Wycombe finished the season on 94 points each – 21 ahead of third-place Kettering Town – and United went up on goal difference. Take that, indeed. Paul Doyle

2) Cowdenbeath

A craving for silverware is not among the symptoms suffered by people afflicted by what writer Ron Ferguson dubbed Mad Cowdenbeath Disease. Indeed, fans of the club nicknamed The Blue Brazil probably have a healthy suspicion of what is commonly considered success, since their glitziest honours have coincided with the outbreak of world wars, and even lower level triumphs have tended to be followed by robust chastening: promotion to the Scottish second tier in 1992, for example, was the prelude to a 38-game home winless streak, and promotion three seasons ago led to last season’s 10-0 spanking by Hearts en route to a bottom-placed finish in the Scottish Championship. So the 380 people who turned up to watch Colin Nish’s side lose 2-1 to Stranraer at Central Park on the opening day of the 2015-16 campaign were hardly cast into deep despair, and may even have been alarmed when their side avenged that defeat with a 3-0 victory last weekend, which consolidated ninth spot in the 10-team league.

There have been times, of course, when the Brazil part of the sobriquet did not seem sarcastic, such as in the 1924-25 season, when the club finished fifth in the top flight, scoring the same number of goals as champions Rangers and delighting with a carefree attacking verve that brought enchanting highs and, naturally, regular setbacks. The Cowdenbeath and Lochgelly Times, quoted in Daniel Gray’s book Stramash! Tackling Scottish Towns and Teams, put it memorably thus during that season: “There is no half-way with Cowdenbeath. They either mak’ a spoon or spill a horn.”

There were heroes in those times – such as the lavishly skilled forward and bon viveur James “Hooky” Leonard – just as there have been since, notably during the management of Craig Levein and then Mixu Paatelainen, who, in 2006, guided the club to their first divisional title for 67 years (no world war ensued). But let’s not get bogged down in results. Nor even performances. For a century and more Cowdenbeath have been serving their purpose well, bringing wholesome fun to a Fife town that used to be all about mining in the 1870s, when the owner of a second-hand furniture shop, one Margaret Pollock, reckoned something was missing from the place: “Mither decided that we’d got tae hae a ba’ so she went tae Glesgae and brocht ane back. That ba’ was really the start o’ football here,” said her son Davie, according to the club’s official history. PD

3) Limerick FC

Remember Kennedy’s goals against Real Madrid in the 1980-81 European Cup? That’s plural, Liverpool fans, so don’t come here talking about Alan’s solitary strike in the final. Only two other players scored against the reigning Spanish champions in that campaign and none of them hit as many as Limerick’s Des Kennedy, who opened the scoring in the first leg of the first round with a wonder-bundle of a finish and then netted in the Bernabéu, too. All right, so Real won both games, 2-1 and 5-1, but Limerick performed with distinction and the memories of when they nearly shocked a side featuring Uli Stielike and Laurie Cunningham are the fondest of the club’s 12 European matches.

That was also the last European match that Limerick have contested and, what is more, they contrived to make a hefty financial loss from what should have been a bonanza, as many of their own fans boycotted the home leg in protest at it being moved over 200kms to Dublin’s Lansdowne Road in search of a bigger gate, and Dubliners stayed away too, meaning only around 6,500 people showed up. So even in an hour of glory, Limerick found themselves in adversity.

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Moving the home fixture was especially ill-considered given that the whole point of founding the club in 1937 had been to give a local football focus in a city where Gaelic games and rugby were and are much loved. The only time before 1980 that Limerick had won the League of Ireland, in 1960, half their team was from Dublin and the club reacted by announcing they would now revert to an almost exclusive locals-only policy. Naturally, the manager they hired to implement this, Ewan Fenton, was Scottish. But he did a fine job during two spells at the club, cultivating an attacking style and guiding the club to its only FAI Cup triumph in 1971, when the team’s strikeforce was spearheaded by Andy McEvoy, one-time joint-highest scorer in the English top flight with Jimmy Greaves. Shrewd managerial appointments have been a feature of Limerick’s history – Sam Allardyce was given his first gig there and so too was Eoin Hand before becoming the world’s youngest international manager when he took charge of Republic of Ireland in 1980.

Another feature of the club’s history, alas, has been financial and legal hardship, leading to several name changes (they were Limerick United against Real but have also been known as Limerick City and Limerick 37 and are currently just Limerick FC), several home grounds and a variety of home kits (but mostly blue, the colour of the jerseys they bought cut-price off Waterford in 1941 when that club resigned from the league over a pay dispute). Lots of Irish sides could tell similar stories. You could probably describe any of the country’s clubs as unglamorous given that, despite rich heritages, they receive relatively little support even in their homeland, even from their own football association. But Limerick seem more up against it than most. And on Friday night they go into the final match of their domestic season needing to win at Sligo Rovers to have any hope of hauling themselves off the bottom of the table and dodging relegation. PD

4) Rochdale

Supporting a football team can often feel like brief moments of pleasure separated by long spells of ennui, where nothing much happens, good or bad, and you question your very existence. You start to run through the decisions in your life that led you to this point, standing on an uncovered terrace in some forgotten armpit of the world, any feeling in your feet a distant memory.

But it’s the supporting that makes it all worthwhile in the end, even if any description of your club’s fans always features the prefix ‘long-suffering’. Last year, an organisation called the English National Football Archive were asked to calculate who was the most long-suffering set of fans in the country, and after chucking various numbers into a big stat-o-matic machine somewhere in Boffinsville (just kidding, chaps), they came up with the name ‘Rochdale’.

However, it wasn’t entirely arbitrary mumbo jumbo that earned them the title, more the fact that Rochdale have spent more time in the bottom tier of the Football League than any other team. Since they were elected to the Football League in 1921, Rochdale have spent 78 seasons in either the Fourth Division or Division Three North, including an unbroken stint in Division Four of 36 years between 1974 and 2010. They have never been higher than the third tier (where they currently reside, having won the third promotion in their history in 2014) and have never won a trophy, although they did reach the League Cup final in 1962, losing to Norwich.

No ennui here: Rochdale fans on the pitch celebrating their club’s win over Coventry City in the third round of the FA Cup in 1971. Photograph: Harry Ormisher/Rex Shutterstock

Indeed, one of Dale’s few claims to wider fame is being the subject of one of those Bill Shankly quotes that nobody is quite sure is genuine, but most people want to be. “Of course I didn’t take my wife to see Rochdale as an anniversary present,” the great man supposedly said. “It was her birthday. Would I have got married in the football season? Anyway, it was Rochdale reserves.”

You sort of start to wonder why clubs like this exist, why interest in them just hasn’t faded away over the years and years of no success, particularly when two of the biggest and richest clubs around are a 30-odd minute tram ride into Manchester.

“I liked the noise and the buzz,” said Alfie, “and when number seven Peter-I-can’t-pronounce-his-second-name scored, it was fantastic. I know we lost 3-1, but I loved the day out. My favourite player is Josh the goalie as I recognised him from when he visited Newhey Primary school. I saw this T-shirt in front of me which said, ‘up the Dale, down the ale’ which I thought was funny.” Nick Miller

5) Lincoln City

You could think of Lincoln as the anti-Everton. The Toffees famously hold the record for the most seasons in the top flight, having played in either Division One or the Premier League in 111 of the 115 completed seasons thus far, relegated just twice, in 1930 and 1951.

By contrast, Lincoln have never played in the top division. Indeed, they hold the record for the team who have played the most seasons in the Football League without ever reaching the elite, 104 in total, although after relegation into the Conference Premier (now the National League) in 2011, they haven’t been able to add to their total. Their highest league position came in 1902, when a finish of fifth in the relatively young Division Two (it had only been formed 10 years previously) must have brought with it promise of something slightly loftier, particularly as that season also saw their equal best FA Cup performance, reaching the last 16 where they lost to Derby.

However, it was not to be. The club do hold a record of sorts, which is the most demotions out of the Football League. On the first four occasions they returned at the first attempt, but they have yet to recover from the latest relegation to non-league.

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What Lincoln do have to recommend them is being one of the first Football League clubs to appoint a full-time black manager (Rochdale, one of our other non-limelight clubs, had the first in Tony Collins back in 1960), specifically Keith Alexander who had two spells in charge at the club in 1993-94, then 2002-2006 .

“People weren’t used to seeing me in the boardroom and I would often be asked for some sort of ID or pointed in the direction of the players’ bar,” he told When Saturday Comes in 2004. “Black managers could not have a better role model,” wrote Paul Elliott in the Guardian after Alexander died in 2010. “He put club chairmen and officials at their ease because he was so engaging, so normal and had such a good sense of humour. And, of course, he could really debate the laws of the game, having qualified as England’s first black referee. Keith had reason to feel bitter about the way he was sometimes treated in football, especially when he started out, but he never succumbed to bitterness and preferred to try to break down barriers with quiet dignity, character, humour and a smile.” NM

Lincoln’s Paul Mayo leaps in delight after putting his team 2-0 up against Scunthorpe during their Division Three play-off semi-final in 2003. The Imps would go down 5-2 to Bournemouth in the final at the Millennium Stadium. Photograph: John Jones/PA

6) Bury

Gigg Lane is not what you’d call a particularly lovely place. Pretty much everything looks like it could do with a lick of paint, slightly crumbling concrete and metal fences keeping out some of the bitter winds on a cold winter’s day, but not all of them; the place surrounded by houses in such a way that you might miss it if you weren’t looking for it. But it is not especially remarkable, in either a positive or negative way, much like the team that plays there. Bury are like dozens of other clubs in the Football League, in that their biggest successes came years ago (two FA Cup wins in 1900 and 1903), and have spent most of the interim shuffling between the divisions below the top tier.

Like most clubs, they have had financial problems, almost going out of business on a couple of occasions and being more familiar with the administrators than they would like. Like most clubs, they have their occasional claims to fame, such as an involvement with the Neville family – Gary paid some players’ wages during one of their financial dips, Jill is the club’s general manager, Gary and Phil’s father Neville a former director. Like most clubs, they hold a slightly obscure record, in their case the biggest win in an FA Cup final, when they beat Derby 6-0 in 1903. Like most clubs, they have a few former managers and players who went on to achieve more fame elsewhere, such as Bob Stokoe (who had two spells as their boss) and Neil Warnock, while Colin Bell started his career there, as did David Nugent.

Theres is a story of no real outstanding consequence to the wider world, but don’t for a minute think that’s a bad thing. Bury are an everyclub, a team that exist more or less exclusively for their own fans, untroubled by everyone else. That might not be glamourous in the traditional sense of the word, but they mean something – plenty – to the relatively small bunch that show up each week. The club is theirs, and in a world where the absolute elite have little to do with the general populous, there’s something pretty special about that. NM